Science Stories

Just beyond the remote mountain village of Yangma in the high Himalayas of eastern Nepal, Nepali conservationists fitted a female snow leopard with a GPS collar. The collar will allow scientists to track this snow leopard’s movements daily for the next year, which will help us learn more about these mysterious and endangered cats. This female becomes the third snow leopard collared near Yangma since 2013, the first two having both been males.

Dr. Shaw leads an interdisciplinary approach to science that draws on the best research from ecology, economics, and the political and social sciences to generate big, cuttingedge ideas for protecting the planet.

We are celebrating major milestones for both leopards and tigers in 2015. Efforts to protect and establish populations of these big cats are yielding results in Russia, China and India. Looking ahead, there is much more work to be done to protect these species.

A one-horned rhinoceros was successfully collared in Nepal late last month. The event was particularly significant because it occurred in a wildlife corridor that connects Nepal’s Bardia National Park with India’s Katerniaghat Wildlife Sanctuary.

Today, the Philippines' oceans are troubled. For over a century, coastal development, destructive fishing practices, coral mining, sedimentation, overfishing and chemical pollution have chipped away at the ocean’s health. Add to that climate change consequences such as ocean warming, acidification and coral bleaching, and we have an undersea war against marine resources. Faced with this problem, many countries within the Coral Triangle have established Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), to conserve what’s left.

WWF challenged a group of programmers, designers and conservationists to spend a Sunday developing a technology system to help the monarch butterfly at the annual SXSW ECO conference in Austin, Texas. The “hackathon” gave attendees just 24 hours to build an app to help monarchs.

The Living Planet Index (LPI)—essentially the S&P 500 Index for wildlife—documents the populations of more than 3,000 wild species. And for the first time, species number less than one-half what they were in 1970.

President Obama announced creation of the world’s largest fully protected marine area on Sept. 25. Using his executive authority he has expanded the existing Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument to six times its current size, resulting in 490,000 square miles of protected marine environment.

To increase chances of conservation success, we must understand traits that make an individual species especially resilient or vulnerable to changes in climate. Different species will be affected in different ways; sometimes negatively, but not always.

WWF and The Coca-Cola Company, are trying to make sure today’s farmers to apply environmental knowledge to farming. Agricultural runoffs like pesticides, fertilizers and topsoil are some of the greatest threats to the Mesoamerican Reef, the second-largest reef in the world.

New research mapping a range of oil spill scenarios in the Canadian Beaufort Sea finds that a spill would likely reach the U.S. shorelines of Alaska and could affect the local communities and wildlife living there.

WWF has found a way to protect the snow leopard while also benefiting nomadic herders. As part of the USAID-funded Conservation and Adaptation in Asia’s High Mountain Landscapes and Communities (AHM) project, local herders like Byambatsooj are now being trained and equipped to collect basic data on the remote mountains they know better than anyone else.

As apex predators, sharks control the delicate balance that exists between earth and one of its most important ecosystems: the ocean. At WWF, we’re leading the fight to save the world’s sharks and preserve the seascapes they call home.

In a groundbreaking study, a WWF-led team discovered Africa’s longest land mammal migration. The migration of Plains (or Burchell's) Zebra stretches from Namibia to Botswana—a distance of more than 300 miles roundtrip.